Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.” – George Orwell, 1984.”

— George Orwell

302. “By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.”

— George Orwell

303. “Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.”

— George Orwell

304. “The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

— George Orwell

305. “The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.”

— George Orwell

306. “Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”

— George Orwell

307. “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

— George Orwell

308. “The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.”

— George Orwell

309. “How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.”

— George Orwell

310. “The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.”

— George Orwell

311. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

— George Orwell

312. “If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”

— George Orwell

313. “Who cares?′ she said impatiently, ’it’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.”

— George Orwell

314. “The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.”

— George Orwell

315. “Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.”

— George Orwell

316. “The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense, it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order.”

— George Orwell

317. “The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.”

— George Orwell

318. “The end was contained in the beginning.”

— George Orwell

319. “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.”

— George Orwell

320. “Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.”

— George Orwell

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321. “Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.”

— George Orwell

322. “The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.”

— George Orwell

323. “It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.”

— George Orwell

324. “No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid; but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”

— George Orwell

325. “We may be together for another six months – a year – there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?”

— George Orwell

326. “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.”

— George Orwell

327. “The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

— George Orwell

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328. “The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.”

— George Orwell

329. “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.”

— George Orwell

330. “The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.”

— George Orwell

331. “It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”

— George Orwell

332. “The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile.”

— George Orwell

333. “Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.”

— George Orwell

334. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

— George Orwell

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335. “Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.”

— George Orwell

336. “Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state – however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.”

— George Orwell

337. “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

— George Orwell

338. “They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.”

— George Orwell

339. “Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.”

— George Orwell

340. “Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”

— George Orwell

341. “The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.”

— George Orwell

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342. “The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb.”

— George Orwell

343. “He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

— George Orwell

344. “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

— George Orwell

345. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.”

— George Orwell

346. “Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

— George Orwell

347. “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

— George Orwell

348. “The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.”

— George Orwell

349. “Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

— George Orwell

350. “Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.”

— George Orwell